Archives

2018

2017

2016

Reflections on religion and the Civil Rights Movement

April 6, 2016

Excerpt from an OUPblog article, published on 4th April, by Carolyn Renée Dupont, Associate Professor of History at the Eastern Kentucky University. She is the author of Mississippi Praying: Southern White Evangelicals and the Civil Rights Movement, 1945-1975, which is now available on NYU Scholarship Online.

"Americans, black and white, love to commemorate the civil rights struggle. School programs, public events, popular culture, and historic markers all recount the heroic battle black Americans waged for their full humanity. Yet, racial inequality continues to plague the United States, and most popular civil rights history mythologizes it in ways that hinder the full realization of the movement’s goals. Many tellings of the Civil Rights Movement story omit how ferociously white individuals and institutions resisted the change that black activists demanded. Among these institutions, American religion served as one of the most important, if often unnoticed, sources of ideologies that thwarted the civil rights struggle."